How to Use Twitter in Your Business

Whether you have a small, medium-sized, or large business, you can use Twitter as a valuable marketing tool. Also, Twitter can help complement your company’s current PR and customer service efforts. The following list describes several ways that you can use Twitter for your business.

Sharing news and stories: On Twitter, you can easily share links to PR releases and stories about your business, service, or product. But in order to make your tweets interesting and diverse so that you can hold on to and increase your followers, consider sharing news and stories about the industry that you serve.

Empowering your fans: Twitter gives you the ability to take a single thought and share it with millions of people. And your customer evangelists can spread your message, as well as their opinions about your company’s greatness, to as many people as possible.

Through a disciplined balance between listening to others and retweeting their useful contributions, eventually you earn the right to ask for their support in return.

Providing customer service: Twitter can help you turn your company’s customer service into a competitive advantage, as Comcast and Zappos.com have done through their highly personal and accessible customer service reps on Twitter.

@ComcastCares offers Comcast users customer service via Twitter.

Finding a fit for your business: Here are just a few of the companies that have revolutionized the way businesses use Twitter customer service, business-to-consumer marketing, business-to-business marketing, and public relations:

Customer service:Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer, is almost obsessed with customer satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, it adopted Twitter as a channel to communicate with its customers and offer customer service.

Business-to-consumer marketing: Ford Motor Company is getting the word out about its new Fiesta model through the Fiesta Movement.

Business-to-business marketing:Duct Tape Marketing uses Twitter as part of its toolkit to deliver valuable information to its audience.

Public relations:Old Spice embraced Twitter as part of its social-media-centric PR strategy that was born by allowing Twitter users to ask questions of their Old Spice shirtless mascot guy, which in turn created huge amounts of traffic and positive brand awareness.

Marketing on Twitter: Marketing on Twitter works in a very different way than traditional marketing. Of course, you can help shape the dialogue: You certainly can (and should) participate in the conversations about your company, products, and services. But you no longer have absolute control over what gets said about them.

Instead of selling a message to a group of consumers, on Twitter you rely on your customers to talk about your product and help you reach others through word of mouth. Twitter is now at the forefront of the customer experience, where customers sell to customers. Companies no longer craft the thoughts and ideas of brands in the board room. Consumers create personal representations of brands in their living rooms, restaurants, and gathering places, and on their keyboards.